Help with Emacs Lisp interactive feature for replacing text

Question

I have been using Emacs for a couple of months now and I want to get started with elisp programming. In particular, I would like to write my own interactive function. However, I got a little lost. (interactive ...) has many options, and I'm not sure which one I want. Then I do not know the names of the functions that I need. If someone kindly helped me turn my pseudo-code into real code, I would be very grateful! (And as always, any links to information spots would be nice. Now I just read this. )

Here is the pseudo code for what I would like to do:

 (defun my-func (buffer) ; I think I need the buffer as an arg? "does some replacements" (interactive ???) ; ? (let (replacements (list '("a-regexp-string" . "a-replacement-string-with-backreferences") ...)) ; more of the above (while replacements (let (current (car replacements)) ; get a regexp-replacement pair (some-regexp-replace-func buffer (car current) (cdr current)) ; do the replacement (setq replacements (cdr replacements)))))) 

Answer 1

First, from the look of your function, you are likely to do this in the current buffer, so no, you do not need to have the "buffer" argument. If this is a bad guess, I can change the code. Further, in "let", if you assign variables, you need another set of parsers around each var / value pair. Finally, when navigating through the list, I prefer to use functionally programmable functions (mapcar, mapc, etc.). I will try to insert some comments here:

 (defun my-func () "Do some replacements" (interactive) (let ((replacements (list '("foo" . "bar") '("baz" . "quux")))) (save-excursion ; So point isn't moved after this function (mapc (lambda (x) ; Go through the list, with this 'inline' function ; being called with each element as the variable 'x' (goto-char (point-min)) ; Start at the beginning of the buffer (while (re-search-forward (car x) nil t) ; Search for the car of the replacement (replace-match (cdr x)))) ; And replace it with the cdr replacements)))) ; The list we're mapc'ing through 

As for reading, I would suggest the Elisp manual that comes with Emacs.